Latest looks of Fennec (Mobile Firefox)

The plan of Mobile Firefox was announced in October last year and the Mozilla community is now very busy to develop Mobile Firefox.

Fennec is the code name of Mobile Firefox, which is a desert fox. You may have seen a fennec in TV animation. The size of fennec is smaller than normal fox and it has big ears. So I think the name of Fennec seems to be suited well for Mobile Firefox.

The Mozilla Community opened the source code of Fennec and a guide of how to build it. It is a little bit intricate to build it because it is not merged into the Mozilla trunk.

After build and run, you can see the following appearance.






The basic features of browser were already implemented such as the navigation bar and bookmark menu. But, panning is a little bit slow and zooming is not working in the latest code.

Fennec can be built in Maemo Scratchbox and run on XULRunner so I'll post a way of how to build and run in N810 later. It would be helpful if you give any feedbacks to the Mozilla community after testing Fennec.

References

• Mozilla and Mobile
• Creating Nightly or “on change” ARM builds for Fennec
• Mozilla's Fennec May Be Just What Mobile Browsing Needs

My N810 was delivered from the US.

I bought a Nokia N810 from Amazon. Actually, there are not any shopping malls selling N810 in Korea so I had to buy an N810 from the oversea shopping mall. Anyway, I am very satisfied with N810. It may be my favorite toy.

N810 uses the Maemo platform that is based on Linux 2.6, GTK+, Matchbox and other open source projects. Scratchbox is used for its development environment that supports a cross-platform development environment. So the users can implement an application without knowing how to use a toolchain for specific target devices. In addition, we can easily install applications from the repositories using Debian packaging & repository system.

I think that it's a truly open mobile platform based on Linux. Because Nokia gave their governance of hildon to the GNOME community.

First, I'd like to build XUL Runner and run Fennec (Mozilla Mobile). It seems that it could run on N810 and Windows Mobile 6. So I'll check the status and give my feedback to the community.

:-)

References

• Mobile/Build/Maemo Build Instructions
• First look: Mozilla Fennec takes browser fight to handhelds